That makes Power sound very appealing. I've never met a real life scientific simulation that wasn't often constrained by memory bandwidth. I'm sure they exist, but they aren't all that plentiful. I'd love to try running the code that matters to me on Power. (For one thing, I don't even know if it would pass basic regression tests; numerical code is touchy. Are gcc/gfortran reliably adequate on Power like they are on x64?) Unfortunately, as everyone else is commenting, entry level x64 is dirt cheap and entry level Power isn't.

I'm more hesitant to say the same about clang/llvm but it's been awhile and I'm probably not current.

I'm surprised if numerical issues are that much of a worry. x86 has now caught up in doing FMA, in particular. I don't know what the build systems actually are, but most of Fedora (and Debian?) is available for POWER, and will typically have at least minimal tests in the package. It's not as if POWER is new for HPC; the Daresbury HPC-X machine was quite high in the top500 15 years or so ago, as an example I was physically close to.

I'm sure there are a lot of problems that fit inside of 120MB.

"Processors have two modes of thermal protection, throttling and automatic shutdown. When a core exceeds the set throttle temperature, it will start to reduce power to bring the temperature back below that point."

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...